Commentary: Dick Cheney: Profiteer-Extraordinaire
VP Dick Cheney has set a standard for War Profiteering that others can only dream about.
By Mick Youther
Vice President Cheney is an angry man. His war isn’t going well, the prospect of a second term is slipping away, and now some troublemakers in Congress are even starting to talk about war profiteering.
• “[Sen. Patrick Leahy kicked] off the Democratic National Committee's "Halliburton Week" focusing on Cheney, the company, ‘and the millions of dollars they've cost taxpayers,’ …”--The Washington Post, 6/26/04
• “Vice President Dick Cheney blurted out the "F word" at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a heated exchange on the Senate floor, congressional aides said on Thursday…[Cheney] ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran.”-- Reuters Jun 24, 2004
I can understand why Cheney is mad. He is getting too old to start a new career, and war profiteering is the only thing he does really well. Dick Cheney has set a standard that other war profiteers can only dream about
• “[As Secretary of Defense], Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer Halliburton to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade.”-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
• “As secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon, steering millions of military dollars to civilian contractors. Two and a half years after Cheney left his federal job, he began cashing in on the very contracts that he helped initiate.”-- Robert Bryce, Mother Jones, 8/2/00
• “[At Halliburton, Cheney] grew rich on government contracts and taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign partners - like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid Cheney $ 73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er, Dick Cheney.”-- Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, 3/29/03
• “Dick Cheney was Halliburton CEO and largest individual shareholder when he left to take charge of George Bush. His business is war, and he will shape U.S. policy to achieve it. Halliburton will get a large chunk of the $200 billion cost of maintaining the troops that invade and occupy Iraq, and the lion’s share of rebuilding the infrastructure…”-- Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/14/02
• “It is close to unprecedented for the government to have given so much of the solution to one contractor.”-- Steven Spooner, a George Washington University professor who specializes in federal contracting, quoted by the AP, 8/4/02
• “After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for vice president, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36 million payoff for his final year of corporate service.”-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
• “What happens financially [by joining the GOP ticket], obviously, is I take a bath , in one sense.”-- Dick Cheney, 7/25/00
• “A recent rise in Halliburton's stock price -- which is up 50 percent since Bush began talking about war in Iraq 18 months ago -- has pushed the value of Cheney's options to more than $10 million.”-- The Modesto Bee, 10/15/03
• “[Last fall] Republicans stripped the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision which would have held companies holding contracts with the U.S. government criminally accountable for price gouging….[For months] Democrats in the US Congress, have sought information about Halliburton’s pricing techniques and contract procedures. The Bush Administration has failed to respond to multiple requests, and instead have stonewalled the public’s right to know, while at the same time extending Halliburton’s no-bid sweetheart deal.”-- Apollo Alliance Special Report, 11/6/03
• “Republicans [on June 16, 2004] blocked an effort…to create stiffer criminal penalties for war profiteering.[The] bill would have created new penalties -- including up to 20 years in jail -- for government contractors convicted of inflating the cost of goods or services.”( The Republicans said,“the provisions were simply too vague to be placed into federal law.”)-- National Journal’s CongressDaily, 6/17/04
What an excuse! If the wording in the amendment was “too vague”, then change the wording—don’t block the amendment. Make it absolutely clear that war profiteering is a crime and will be punished as such.
Cheney’s privatization of the military has made war profiteering a tempting career for anyone who passes through the ever-revolving door between business and government. If the current members of Congress won’t do something about it, we need some new people in Congress.
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